


2am thoughts

by viverella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Break Up, F/M, POV Second Person, Post-Relationship, but it's there at the end if you're looking for it, you really have to squint to see the bruce/nat and clint/laura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 04:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3796714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kind of late night regrets and early morning thoughts you have about the love that swept you off your feet, the love that you gave up in favor of something more stable, the love that you'll never get back, for better or for worse, because you can be whole and satisfied and happy and still wonder <i>what if, what if, what if</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	2am thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> oh my god I'm literally _so sorry_. I have no idea what this is but I was in the middle of writing a paper for class the other day and thinking about the absolute disaster that Age of Ultron is going to be for my favorite ship because each new spoiler I see just scares me more and more about what's going to happen to them and this sort of... just...... happened??? I don't know why this turned out the way that it did (I don't even ship bruce/nat romantically at all??? what the hell brain??????) or how this ended up being in second-person even though I almost never write in second person, but I imagine these are the things you'd think about at 2am when you're thinking about all the "what if's" in life when things don't turn out the way you once thought they were going to. 
> 
> anyway, uh, this is super different from how I usually write, so I hope y'all don't hate it? sometimes ya girl wants to feel a little more like a poet than a prose writer. it gets very flowery and atmospheric and, again, I have literally _no idea_ how this happened. please forgive me for being so ridiculous.

“We’ll always have Budapest,” you remember her saying even years after everything else is gone. 

“We’ll always have Budapest,” she used to say, over and over, like it was a prayer, like it was a promise. Like it was the only thing she ever knew or would ever know, like she could never forget. 

It’s been so many years since you heard the sound and your hearing has gotten worse and you couldn’t quite make it out the last time she said it, laughing over a cup of coffee in the morning, just weeks before it all fell apart, her mouth obscured by steam and blinding joy, but you recognized it anyways out of habit because she always said it out of habit, like it meant everything and nothing. 

“We’ll always have Budapest,” like she’s running, like she’s hiding, like she’s sharing something secret with you, and you could never be sure, but you waited and watched and cherished it every time she let it slip. 

_Budapest_ , you think, and you smile still.

\---

Perhaps you would have noticed it, had you not been so blinded by the way you wanted _we’ll always have Budapest_ to mean _I have always wanted you and you and you_ , because you remember, even now, the chill of winter and the heat of her mouth on yours, that hotel room with the window facing the square, letting her press your bare back up against it like you weren’t afraid of the fire in your chest. But at the time all it could be was the danger, the thrill, being exposed in a new way that you’d never felt before, feeling vulnerable without feeling lost, feeling powerful without feeling monstrous, and you saw the look in her eyes too, like she thought she could burn whole cities to the ground if only you were by her side. 

This is the truth that you want to believe: that it could have been, at least for a time, though sometimes you think about it and it feels like wading through a thick fog and you wonder how you ever thought you could see her clearly. 

“We’ll always have Budapest,” she would always say, always chasing after the word _‘but’_ like this thing, like _you_ were always the exception to the rule. 

These days you find yourself wondering – _Was I the exception or was I the rule? Could it have been any other way?_

\---

You see her in a SHIELD recovery room after a mission goes south and you manage to make it out despite your over-bourgeoning pride, not letting anyone set up any safety net because there was never any point in being so good if you weren’t the best and you weren’t the best if you needed backup, and you see her, still work with her because the muscles remember where the mind tries to forget and you still know how her body moves in a fight more than anything else. You close your eyes sometimes and you think you can almost feel where she would settle, if she would still have you now. 

She meets your eyes through the glass and you remember the way the air used to shake between you, and she nods at you _yes I’m okay_ like the old days, the tilt of her head and the slimmest smile flitting at the corner of her mouth, all your old signs and shorthands that jangle around in your chest now like loose change. 

You go home that night and you recognize the demon at the bottom of the bottle, recognize your father in him, and you drink to forget, you drink to remember. You see the demon and you stop. You don’t drink and you dream instead, you wonder.

You wonder what a person is supposed to do with all this knowledge, all this muscle memory that won’t go away, because your chest still knows to ache when she smiles at you, your heart still knows to race when she runs off into smoke, and you still wonder what she ever meant when she let the laughter spill out of her throat the way that rivers overflow after a heavy rain. She was always this odd something that couldn’t be pinned down, would never let anyone pin her down, and you loved her for her sharp edges, for her warmth. You loved her and you could never pin her down and you will never get the chance to pin her down again and you can still feel the places her fingers pressed bruises into your skin.

\---

You are too old to think that things will end up the way you first imagined, the way you imagined when you first saw her, too young and too rough and too bitter and still running and running and running because she couldn’t let that hospital burn down and collapse with the future echoes of her past self still trapped inside, and you remember her kindness and how that bit you down to your bones and you thought then that you knew that dreaming was illogical. 

It was Budapest and it was winter and you saved her and she saved you and you were the one who ended up getting shot, clean through and through but still staining your clothes red, and you think that maybe, you fell in love with her right then and there, this woman who had nothing and everything to prove, and maybe that’s what you think she means when she brings up Budapest later. Or maybe you fell in love with her years later, after too many impersonal hotel rooms and drunken nights, maybe you fell in love with her in the moments in between, and maybe that’s what you think she means too. 

You are too old to think that things will end up the way you first imagined, and yet, years later, early morning thoughts and late night regrets cloud your mind on the nights when you don’t quite connect, when you’re still not sure if you’re a real person yet (imagine, forty years old now and you’re still not sure who you dreamed of being when you grew up), and you keep seeing the same shadows out of the corner of your eye – red hair and winter in Budapest and Natasha, and Natasha, and Natasha. Your love is different now and it’s taken a new-old shape in your chest, and you know that you and her wouldn’t fit anymore, not the way you used to picture it in your head, a decade and a lifetime ago, but your love is love and Natasha smiles and your body remembers where you have tried to forget. 

\---

There’s a necklace that she never wears anymore that sits on her dresser (still, you know, still, because she confronts her past like she could fight a hurricane), a trinket you bought her in Seoul (or was it Istanbul or Bogota? You don’t remember anymore because your bones are so weary of war that the fights blur together into one long stream of white noise after so many years spent wading through other people’s battles). She doesn’t wear it anymore, thin and frail as it is, and you wonder if it’s because it started to feel like a noose, if you started to feel like too much dead weight. 

“Clint,” she said when you showed her the necklace, and her voice crinkled and crunched like broken glass underneath your feet. “Clint you can’t do this.”

You laughed back then, because you were younger and lighter and liked to believe that you could conquer fate if you just fought hard enough; you laughed and you said, like you didn’t understand what she was saying, “Do what?”

And she sighed and fiddled with the necklace in her hands, gently pressing the tip of the arrow into the tip of her finger and watching her skin bounce back. “I can’t promise you anything,” she’d said, and it had settled in your chest like a salve even though she said _I can’t_ because it always sounded, to you, a little too much like _I want_ (because you did the same thing, because you were cut from the same cloth, because you ran, too, when you meant to stay).

“I can’t promise you anything,” she said, and she smiled that secret half-smile like she had some long-forgotten treasure hidden at the base of her throat, and you smiled too, like it was sunshine after a long winter, and she’d let you help her put the necklace on anyways, and there, out of the corner of her mouth, out it slipped like she couldn’t help herself, “But we’ll always have Budapest.”

And back then, the sound of her laughter broke around you like something soft and sharp, like a snowstorm in December, and you thought you knew what it meant to be expansive.

If only, you think later, now, if only you knew what you know now, that the space between the words is not something steady and that makes all the difference (or does it, you wonder, always wondering if you’d give up the size and shape of your ribcage now if it meant a little less creakiness in your bones when you lie down to sleep at night, wondering if you’d give up the memories that taught you what it meant to be warm). 

\---

Budapest is not like the others think. Budapest is twice – once spotting the girl with bright red hair and fire in her eyes and getting shot trying to make sure that the inferno in her bones didn’t consume her whole, once with her by your side, fighting and shooting and fucking in that hotel room with the great wide window facing the square, your bare back pressed up against the cool glass, reminding you of the first time, of winter, of heat. 

Budapest is not like the others think. It is once finding her and another finding yourself, finding each other, and now, you think, it is finding what it means to be apart. 

The hotel room is the same as you remember, the clear window facing the square, but the vacant space next to you feels like a canyon and a crater and a promise, too, that you can be just like this, that Budapest will be and will never be again. You fall asleep with the curtains thrown wide open, trying to befriend the light from the square as a reminder of yourself. 

_I, too, am here. I, too, can be something radiant._

\---

Your girl looks at you now and she smiles and she says, “I love you” and you know it’s a promise. There’s no ambiguity with her, because she’s not a spy and she’s not trained to be cautious; she just gives and gives and gives and you know you can trust her. You know where you stand, always, and you know what you are and aren’t and what the outline of you looks like next to her, and for a man who has always acted on assumptions, there’s something unnerving and thrilling about acting on facts, about knowing all the knowns, about giving all the givens, and it’s a whole new kind of tipping over the edge of a precarious precipice that you think you’ve never known but maybe always wanted to try. Like bungee jumping. Like cliff-diving. And down below, you think you can make out the shape of her arms and you feel warm all over, wanting, needing to taste this new kind of danger. 

“I love you,” your girl says, and you know she means it in the simplest way anyone can mean it, and you smile and think of Budapest, of how different this is, of how nice it is, not of how much better or worse, but purely of how foreign it is and how you can feel every soft touch like a shiver through your veins.

“I love you,” your girl says, and you close your eyes and think of home. 

\---

You remember and you remember and you remember still, and you’re married now and not to the one with whom you learned what it felt like to be a whole person, on your own and according to your own terms, and this new love is gentler and quieter and kinder than anything you’ve ever known and it’s everything and it’s nothing. Natasha’s looking at someone new now too with those wide, sharp, loving, harsh eyes (and he’s gentler and kinder to her than you think you ever were, _better for her_ , you catch yourself thinking and then stop, _better for her just like my girl is better for me_ ), and you still remember her, remember the thorns in the love you had for her, remember where it pinched and caught and unfurled like nothing you could imagine, remember the thrill of it, how you loved every second of it, because you know by now that there’s room enough for more than one love in your heart, and you think as you nod to each other through the glass door of a recovery room that in one way or another, you will always love her and you ache.

**Author's Note:**

> if you don't hate me for this fic, you can come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you want!
> 
> thank you for reading!


End file.
